Participating in Sustainability: An Intersectional Ecofeminist Discourse Analysis in Rural Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this study is to conduct a discourse analysis of the term “sustainability” from an intersectional ecofeminist perspective, as well as to engage in an ethnographic study conducted within a sustainability project in rural Turkey. The central question of this research is how the interpretative repertoires of my research participants reflect contemporary embodied experiences of sustainability. In the context of this thesis, the term interpretative repertoire refers to particular stylistic and grammatical expressions in my research setting that provide significant means by which to understand my research participants’ values and ways of seeing the world. Analyzing two selected interpretative repertoires from my research participants’ conversations, namely mavi boncuk dağıtmak (“distributing blue beads”) and özveri (“self-sacrifice”), my analysis will demonstrate how these specific repertoires problematize the patriarchal and capitalist underpinnings of sustainability efforts in a contemporary Turkish context. Focusing upon crisis points when my research participants struggled to solidify their power and to establish meaning, I demonstrate how these interpretative repertoires work towards constructing gendered and classed relations in rural communities. Drawing upon theoretical discourse analysis as well as my ethnographic data, I argue that for sustainability to become truly “sustainable” it needs to be sensitive towards, and able to work with, participants’ gender and class differences. I suggest constructing counter-narratives to mavi boncuk dağıtmak as a means to oppose patriarchal dominations over both women and nature, as well as a democratization of the özveri interpretative repertoire to eliminate injustice and discrimination, transforming it into a double-sided request that participants in sustainability projects of all classes and genders can make and deploy to hold both themselves and each other accountable.